"Your brain says it first; then your body reacts. You have to visualize the shot first. And if you see yourself missing the shot, you say, this doesn’t look right; it doesn’t fall right. You stand up and regroup. Because your body is not doing what your brain says. Your brain is saying, 'I’m going to make the six ball.’ Your body is saying, ‘I don’t think I will.’"

“He fought all the way up until he passed away. One of the nights he was working out. he finished hitting the bags over there, and he went over to the toilet to crap. I’m waiting for him, so after a while I go to the door and says.'Spud. come on. son. We got to get on home We got to get going.’ He says, ’Dad, I got a headache. I got an awful headache.’"

"We get articles in the Union-Tribune about so-called Pitbull .38s being the most popular lethal handgun, as if the Pitbull were a specially dangerous brand-name gun. But a Pitbull is just a .38 or .44 that is more than four years old. It’s not a specific gun at all. The word actually means nothing at all but, you know, it sounds like a nasty dog that bites kids."

“We feel much more comfortable in medieval clothes. Throw on your tunic, your cloak, and your sword, and you’re all set. You feel much freer, much gayer. But it's not something that anybody can do. The first couple of times, you feel a little uneasy. But after a while, when you’re at a revel and everyone else is dressed the same way. you begin to enjoy it."

The cheerleaders of Poway, Horizon Christian, Granite Hills, Carlsbad, Eastlake, and Santa Fe Christian, watch and learn. Some schools, such as Carlsbad, send their show squad of 20 girls to camp, “show” meaning the same thing it does when applied to dogs and horses. A show squad exists for competition, not to cheer at games.

“I contacted UCSD and Scripps. Eventually I wound up with a couple of oceanographers in a lab at Scripps, where all the equipment was similar to what you’d find in a microbiology laboratory. I told them I was a science-fiction writer;one of the guys looked at me with this gleam in his eye and said, ‘Give me a few days and I could figure out a way to do that....’"